


gethsemane

by Legendaerie



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Ambiguous/One-sided Relationship, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, In Medias Res, Non-Linear Narrative, post ME1, slight ME2 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-17
Updated: 2016-10-17
Packaged: 2018-08-23 01:08:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8307964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Legendaerie/pseuds/Legendaerie
Summary: Shepard is an imposing figure, her memory casting long shadows, and in the wake of her death he feels blind in the dark. Fumbling just to mimic her glory, her splendor, a cheap knock-off who let her legacy down. Or; Archangel, before.





	

**Author's Note:**

> from one space marine hell to the next. 
> 
> title and general fic structure taken from the [song of the same name](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdyudQwQEKE) by Dry the River. if you want to read my meticulous, i-studied-english-lit-in-college-for-four-years analysis of the lyrics, link to that is [here.](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qRc25Z17xtRzQs-RMZM4hnA82Wx5b5z9-lBaMH2DFiQ/edit?usp=sharing) not explicitly comics compliant.
> 
> i’m not even finished with ME2 and im in so goddamn deep
> 
> Once again, a big thanks to [Dawn](https://playerprophet.tumblr.com/) for her priceless beta work. you're a peach!

 

He’s going to die here.

Today, tomorrow; in ten minutes, even. Garrus may not be sure exactly when but he knew, the moment he crossed the bridge below, that it would be a one-way trip. He’s accepted that. The banner of his dogged idealism has faded, fragile and fluttering in the wake of all he’s lost.

But not all of him is ready to give up. The part that’s always gotten him into trouble with his superiors, the part that brought him to Omega in the first place and demands that he hold his ground in the face of injustice; the part that drew him to Shepard draws the line and waits, with bare claws, for anyone to cross it.

It’s this aspect of Garrus that draws his eye to a head peering over the barrier, raises the sniper rifle, pulls the trigger all in a matter of seconds. An automatic, exhausted reaction to the distinctive motion of a vorcha vaulting over a barrier.

A near-miss. Fatal none-the-less, if the burst of blood and the aborted scream are anything to gauge success with. He feels nothing about the death, either, not so much as a flash of satisfaction at a rushed but effective shot.

He’s going to die here, and the gangs will grow back like thorny agniratha vines, just as fast and tough and toxic as ever. A turian alone can never last very long. Sure, he’ll go down fighting, but he’ll go down. He knows this. They know this.

It’s just a matter of time.

Until then, Archangel will sit in his heavenly seat, and enact swift judgement on every ill-fated merc who tries to reach him. Here he will stay, until he runs out of clips and they overrun him, and he leaves behind nothing more significant than a phthalo-blue stain on the floor and a footnote in someone else’s legacy.

And that? None of him is okay with that.

 

* * *

 

The Citadel, after Shepard.  It might as well have been a different place entirely; the administrative district locked away from public access, C-Sec officers only emerging from the dented labyrinths to take their turn as gatekeepers for the shopping district. The walls are glittering with brightly colored lights and myriads of advertisements, but it can’t hide the fact that they’re still walls where there had been bright open spaces, walls where there had been greenery, walls that blotted out the stars.

He’d tried to resume working there for a while, the new uniform uncomfortable against his skin and his mandibles clenched so tightly closed every time some Council species made an off-color remark about humans that it’s a wonder they didn’t end up glued to his teeth. Toughing it out to try to keep the momentum of change going, if only for Shepard’s sake.

He lasted two months.

Garrus had turned in his second resignation to C-Sec, and like a bad omen, the Normandy had been blown to hell just a few hours later. The news had stopped him dead in his tracks on the way to the armory. A simulated loop of the ship torn apart, overlaid by the testimonials of the surviving crew, punctuated by speculation and opinion from outside sources.

He felt the searing blast of the explosion in the back of his mouth, shrapnel sliding down his throat when he’d swallowed. By the time the bulletins were back to displaying bright adverts and the latest celebrity gossip, Garrus had boxed up everything he owned.

On his last trip out of the Citadel, tying off loose ends, he bought a pack of playing cards from a human vendor. He had memories - they’d been fond once, but were souring like milk left in the sun - of losing miserably to Shepard and Williams at some gambling game. Leaving gifts on the graves of the departed wasn’t exactly the norm for turian culture, but neither was it strictly a human one either.

The flowers around the small crystal pillar were already wilting with neglect when he arrived. There might have been other tributes left there, but security had loosened until it fell away, slack like discarded clothes. Garrus left the cards there, under the shimmering list of names of casualties from the attack on the Citadel, and took the next transport ship as far away from Widow as possible.

 

* * *

 

The next wave comes around 0500 standard hours. They’re mostly LOKI droids, repurposed for battle; some tech-savvy Salarian running them behind the scenes and pricing their life above whatever credits they’ve been promised. Smart. Not smart enough to make progress, but enough that the sniper rifle radiates a comforting heat through his gloves.

Garrus keeps an aural canal tilted towards the radio chatter he can intercept through his visor. Not the stations - those seldom offer any real insight - but the com channels. Most of its in code now, but he can still identify voices. He knows it's a Blue Suns when they spit a furious curse in perfect sync with his latest headshot that splinters a LOKI into fire and fragments. Radios can’t filter out all of a turian’s subvocals, and his are thrumming with fury and frustration.

 _“Fall back to regroup.”_ Another curse, or maybe the name of a subordinate. _“It's like chucking credits into a black hole.”_

Good. At least he’s making the bastards pay for the damage they’ve caused.

It is a low standard to hold himself to after the whole saving the galaxy bit, but it’s the only one Garrus can reach. Shepard is an imposing figure, her memory casting long shadows, and in the wake of her death he feels blind in the dark. Fumbling just to mimic her glory, her splendor, a cheap knock-off who let her legacy down.

By the Spirits, how did they ever manage to accomplish what they did?

Tired and tense like a sprain, he fires one last parting shot at the deserted overhang before letting the maxxed-out heat sink clatter to the floor between his knees. It’s a defiant and reckless gesture, like spitting in the ocean. It doesn’t make him feel better, but he likes to pretend it does. The Garrus that helped destroy Sovereign would have felt better.

In the long run, though, it’s a waste. He’s been able to modify the heat sinks just enough to reuse some of the older cartridges, but by his estimates he has about two hundred shots left.

After that, well.

 

* * *

 

Omega was a festering sore in civilized space; bright and pulsing and rancid, begging to be popped. Garrus was drawn in like a swarm to carrion, and he hovered on the edge of Afterlife for several days just watching.

Aria T’Loak reminded him of Shepard, somehow, a dark and twisted counterpoint, an echo of what she could have become. They had the same inexorable will, the same brutal charm. Her grip on the place is impossible to remove. Half from respect, half from self preservation, Garrus didn’t even try. He just slipped in the spaces between her fingers, cleaned up the especially abhorrent sides of the galaxy and used Omega as a home base. She let him.

At first, he had thought it was because Aria might understand. He thought she might welcome his help in keeping a lid on the more violent crimes, even appreciate his particular drive and insight. As time wore on, as crime wore him down like the winds that blasted sand against Temple Palaven and made the carved sides smooth, Garrus realized he didn’t matter to her at all. To Omega, he was just some merc with a pretentious, human nickname and a handful of matching companions.

One day he woke up and realized the posters of Shepard had changed.

He saw one in a space station on First Land, in a flickering little bootleg display meant more as a curio than a real advertisement. She had been replaced with a composite image of the ideal human, a vague silhouette gesturing to join the Alliance Military, with impractically long and flowing hair billowing behind her like a flag. They didn’t bother preaching that she was the first human Spectre; the Council seemed ready to ensure she was the last.

How eagerly they all twisted the dream of Shepard to suit their own agendas. They’d even changed her nose.

Garrus bought the little display anyway and carried it in his hip pocket for exactly six firefights, before an errant bullet shattered it against his skin.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, Garrus wonders - when he has the time, the luxury to set his mind to mull over distant things - if Shepard would have done any better with his squad. The obvious answer is yes, mostly because anyone would have been hard-pressed to do any worse. Ten good fighters, good soldiers and technicians and biotics, good beings who were like him and believed in the right path rather than the easy one.

They deserved better. They deserved Shepard.

But then he’ll hear her voice, sometimes, what he can remember of it (smooth and cool like ice, brittle too when she needed it to be, glittering when she was pleased) and it says things like, _you did your best and that’s all anyone could expect of you_. Or, _stop feeling sorry for yourself, since when do turians feel self pity?_ Or even _if you’re Archangel then why the hell didn’t you call your team the seraphim or something?_

Horribly presumptuous of him, he knows, to try to feel the fading wisps of her spirit through time and distance. Garrus wants to draw from her strength - from their strength, together, all of them a team against Saren and Sovereign - because his will alone is not enough. It never has been enough.

No. Not true. He was enough when he was with Shepard. When he was part of her unit, watching her back and knowing she would watch his in turn. She's spoiled him for life now, with her capability, her wit, the sense of security with her at his six. Even the memory is addictive.

In the present, the motion trackers he’s set yanks him out of his shallow rest. Garrus sits up and peers down the scope. It’s a troop of humans, and their blood spatters as red as the accents on her N7 armor as he mows them down.

A hundred and seventy shots left.

 

* * *

 

Eleven days after Sidonis betrayed him and his ten teammates. Eleven days after another turian had turned on his unit and let them be slaughtered like animals. Eleven days and thirty five dead criminals later, Garrus returned to Afterlife.

He didn’t expect to be let in, but he was nodded past the front doors and claimed the first empty corner he could find on the upper level. Mandibles chafing against his fangs as he watched the dancers with empty eyes, Garrus spent most of the credits he’d looted from those thirty five bodies on drinks that he tossed back until the world spun at the edges of his vision.

He’d trusted them, and they’d trusted him in turn. The loss of his team - the first thing that seemed right since the Normandy - was like losing a limb, a snapping of bone and a rending of muscle, and Garrus felt as though he was hemorrhaging out even then. He clutched his free hand against his side anyway, his arm pressed tight across his waist.

Somewhere between drink sixteen and sixty, the bartender froze in the middle of serving him. Garrus followed her gaze up and over his shoulder to a female figure on the balcony, her hands braced on the rail, every line of her body smooth and supple and unstoppable as a biotic pulse.

For one long moment, he swore it was Shepard. Every unspoken thought roared in the back of his mind, then, drowning out even the cries of the dead that howl for justice. Overwhelming like a sudden cloudburst, sobering as the rain, came the knowledge that he had loved her and never told her that. He had loved Shepard, and never known.

Her head turned, slowly, towards the exit, and he saw the hue of her skin in the flickering lights; blue gilded in gold, drenched in pulsing passionate red. He saw one of her guards dragging a weakly-struggling mercenary away, a dark wet stain spreading across the distinct Eclipse uniform. The shock that someone had slipped so far under his guard was dulled, a gunshot fired underwater, and Aria was gone when he looked back up.

A message was waiting for him when he dragged himself home to the little alcove above the sewage pipes; an invoice slid under the twice-repaired door marked paid in full and a short note at the bottom.

_“Icarus might have been a more appropriate name._

_\--A”_

 

* * *

 

Fifty four. Fifty three. Fifty two.

A human launches herself over the barricade, her right leg just a bit faster than her left, her first step a feint that he remembers fooled a hundred geth. Garrus freezes, his grip still tight on the rifle, halfway through pulling the trigger. Her companions wear their helmets. She doesn’t.

Fifty one, and the shot goes wide. The heat sink falls to the ground, hissing.

Shepard raises her head and looks him dead in the eye, raises her pistol, and misses him by a league. Keeps on jogging, even when he fumbles a concussive round to splatter against her shoulder, knocking her off pace.

Fifty, and the turian behind her falls in a heap of white and blue.

He can hold out just a little bit longer.

 


End file.
